28.05.2026

People want to believe

Though it is quite obviously a distraction tactic, the release of Nasa and war department files on UFOs has been a big hit with the public. Paul Demarty looks at the modern obsession with ‘alien visitors’

Publication of the ‘Unidentified Flying Objects’ files by the US Department of Defense - sorry, Department of War - has generated a lot of interest in the usual circles.

These circles are quite wide, at least in the United States. Half of Americans, by some polls, believe that we have hosted visitors from other worlds. The imagery of the classic accounts of ‘close encounters’ has fully penetrated into mass culture, with the flying saucers and little green (or grey) men. “Releasing the UFO files” was a popular on-again, off-again slogan of Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, along with various other sets of ‘files’, some of which - not least the Epstein files - have caused him a lot of bother.

Luckily, no little green man is likely to be so troublesome. The disclosures in the files are so familiar as to be deeply nostalgic, for those of us raised on The X-files. Strange lights; apparently sober military men describing impossibly fast-moving objects glimpsed from a fighter cockpit; grainy videos of … something or other. All we need is a little bit of cattle mutilation for good measure. (In the first episode of South Park, it turns out that the aliens are here to talk to the only truly intelligent species on earth - the cows. “Why have you been mutilating us?” demand the cows. “Sorry,” the alien captain replies, “that was Carl. He’s new.”)

In any case, there are two things that need discussion here: the widespread and extremely persistent popular belief in extraterrestrial life, in the face of all available evidence; and the parapolitical obsession with obtaining these disclosures, and the disappointments built into the disclosures themselves.

Imagining aliens

‘Popular ufology’ is a product of the early cold war. This period, following on from World War II, saw rapid advances in aeronautical engineering and rocketry. The US and USSR alike had plenty of esoteric new craft to prototype, and each side further inherited its own allocation of ex-Nazi scientists. As the German strategic picture got worse, Hitler and his retinue took ever greater refuge in the invention of Wunderwaffen - futuristic weapons that would supposedly turn the tide. Few ever saw real use (notably the V-1 and V-2 rockets), and the resources lavished on them probably hastened defeat. Nonetheless, the designs fascinated the post-war superpowers, and there had even been a plan for a disc-shaped flying machine.

As new aircraft were tested, often in remote locations, commercial and military pilots - never mind the mere earthbound folks in smalltown USA - had no frame of reference for what they were seeing. Even jet engines were novel in those days. So these really were, in some sense, ‘unidentified flying objects’: the people working on these classified projects certainly were not going to publicly ‘identify’ them … So fantasies tended to spread, as did the (correct) instinct that the government was somehow involved. Highly publicised incidents like the 1947 Roswell crash fuelled the mania.

In 1952, the US Air Force commenced Project Blue Book, which collected reports of UFO sightings. There was always a chance, after all, that these would be Soviet spy aircraft … Enormous piles of material were assembled, but nothing conclusively interesting was learned, except that people with the idea of alien invaders in their heads tend to come up with very strange notions about weather balloons and high-altitude lightning. A very large number of the sightings were taken to be U-2 and A-12 spy plane prototypes; but, of course, this could not be publicly acknowledged.

Interest in UFOs and aliens has waxed and waned ever since. A significant uptick came after the end of the cold war; in the same year, the same US television network, Fox, broadcast a preposterously hokey alien autopsy film and the first season of The X files. This was the beginning, also, of the public internet; for the first time, a subset at least of ordinary citizens could easily share their experiences. Ufology was one of many subcultures to get a major lift from this; and the simultaneous and marked decline in general civic participation tended to increase the prominence of such obsessions.

What do the aliens want? Here, popular belief draws directly from science fiction. There are a few models: the evil invaders (The X files, Invasion of the body snatchers, and so on), the ‘angels’ coming to rescue humanity (2001: a space odyssey, Arrival, or for that matter the fully-communist space travellers of the Posadists), and brute indifference (HP Lovecraft’s elder gods, and the Strugatsky Brothers’ Roadside picnic). A more recent theory was aired prominently by vice-president JD Vance: these are not aliens at all, but demons. This is actually an increasingly common belief in ultra-reactionary trad-Catholic circles, promoted notably by a popular influencer-exorcist with the unimprovable name of Father Chad Ripperger.

In each case, the alien in fact does the same work. Social contradictions can be projected outwards, externalised as either the threat of invasion/demonic possession or the promise of eschatological transformation. The mere possibility of confronting the alien visitors - militarily, or to accept their gifts - holds out the promise that the defects of human civilisation can be overcome. The remoteness of political structures may be put down to the adventitious agency of these godlike creatures, who manipulate our leaders. It is notable that Tucker Carlson, say, cannot face the fact that Trump has simply decided to launch an insane war of aggression against Iran, for perfectly ordinary reasons like hubris or cognitive decline: he must instead explain it by way of demonic possession. The secret alien conspiracy is a semi-secularised version of demonic possession, and thus it is unsurprising to find that for men like Ripperger and Vance, the two ideas have wholly fused together.

This logic of political displacement also drives the ‘release the files’ phenomenon in the large - generally a phenomenon of so-called ‘parapolitics’, an interpretation of politics that puts deep-state conspiracies in the driving seat.

There have been many such sets of ‘files’ in the second Trump term - either released or dangled temptingly. A promise to release material on the John F Kennedy and Robert F Kennedy assassinations was part of the deal to get RFK’s kooky son on board with the Trump campaign; the upshot for ordinary Americans is the return of measles. Precious little new emerged in the release last year, but it really would take alien intervention, one expects, to convince the American people that Lee Harvey Oswald did it alone.

The UFO files cannot be separated from the broad political context: Trump’s popularity is cratering; he is trapped in a war with Iran, which is directly and obviously responsible for price inflation that will get worse before it gets better, having campaigned both as a peace candidate and an anti-inflation candidate. The Maga hardcore mostly keep faith with him, but some prominent celebrity supporters, like Carlson, are peeling off. The time is ripe, in other words, for a risible piece of political theatre.

Then there is the whole Epstein mess. Trump was always more circumspect on Epstein disclosures than popular opinion believed, but he nonetheless courted the Epstein-obsessive vote, and even put the ridiculous podcasters, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, in at numbers 1 and 2 at the FBI (Bongino has since resigned; Patel continues to blunder his way from disaster to disaster). Trump, of course, would have known that he was at risk of reputational damage from new Epstein disclosures, since he had been a close friend at least into the 2000s.

Epstein files

There was nonetheless a big photo-op, where Epstein files were offered to various rightwing media celebrities, containing no new information. This handed the initiative to Trump’s opponents, both the Democrats and renegade Republicans like the now-unseated Thomas Massie. The Epstein releases that followed have been major political events, though oddly the effects are more severe outside the US (as we Brits know only too well …). Certainly no smoking gun has come out to catch Trump in a lie about his relationship with Epstein.

Precisely because they really have been consequential, the Epstein files demonstrate the ultimate futility of this basically archival approach to politics. You knock the crown off Prince Andrew’s head; the monarchy remains. Peter Mandelson is disgraced; Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman return to advise the PM. The relentless digging for new personal connections with Epstein does discover new facts and possibilities, but discovers them in a form that is itself misleading. The Epstein obsessive comes to believe that the world is as it is because it is run by a paedophile cabal with intelligence connections; but this is backwards. Rather rich and powerful men get to indulge their depraved appetites with impunity because the world is as it is. Their impunity is not an explanation: it is a thing to be explained.

So it is with the aliens. There was always something a bit broken about the very premise of The X files, after all - Mulder and Scully slowly uncover ‘The truth’, which is (spoiler!) that the American state is run by a shadowy cabal in league with alien invaders, hoping that they can survive the takeover as a kind of Vichy government. Mulder and Scully do all this as vulnerable junior employees of the FBI, controlled by the same cabal. Why are they suffered to do this? No serious answer is ever offered. If you want to enjoy the thing, you just have to go with it.

That works for a lovably hokey TV series, but there is something desperately sad about employing the same logic in politics. We demand the state release the files, which, if we are right about their content, will condemn it. The files are released with extensive redactions and omissions. Perhaps a change of government gets a new set of files, with different redactions. Even a major revelation cannot solve the confusion. If a memo is found where, let’s say, ‘Cointelpro’ discusses promoting alien conspiracies as a piece of psychological warfare, the true believers will insist that the memo is fake and itself a psy-op. Conversely, say a memo is found that declares that US officials have really recovered an alien corpse - then a different set of sceptics will say the same thing: that it’s been planted there to fool the ‘sheeple’.

The ordinary enthusiasts, no matter how great their conviction, are not in fact in a position to verify any of this. They know they only find out what the government lets them, and thus the revelations therein must ultimately be untrustworthy. Release-the-files is ultimately a political doom-loop, an anxiety dream where all doors take you back to the same place you are trying to escape.

What the parapolitics obsessives lack is political agency, which for Marxism is an indispensable condition for serious political understanding. The end of the cold war and the defeat of the workers’ movement across the advanced capitalist world has tended to degrade political agency, at least as it is understood by Marxists, both within the workers’ movement and outside it, as there is no longer such a great need for anti-communist mass politics either.

It is perhaps unsurprising, but still regrettable, that this sort of parapolitics is a temptation for some on the left. The fall of the USSR and satellites is reinterpreted as merely a matter of CIA destabilisation, and not something ultimately rooted in those societies’ intrinsic dysfunction. We all gently mock the ‘Ufological’ theories of J Posadas, but there is no less credulity in the widespread view that recent world history basically unspooled on Jeffrey Epstein’s private island. The nicknaming of Trump’s Iran war as ‘Operation Epstein Fury’ is witty, but wrong-headed.

If we ever get round to storming our own winter palaces, no doubt many strange stories regarding the secret state will emerge. We shall never get there, however, if we are trapped in the confusion and despair of conspiracy theories.